Let’s Roll

As I have long held, the release date for Fugitives from Earth will be OryCon in mid-November. Let us work backward from that in order to create a rough schedule for the next couple of months, shall we?

I want to reserve a month, if at all possible, for final proofing and ordering. So that brings us to mid-October. Then, I’ll need a week or so for layout and cover design–the hard work on the cover is largely done, it just needs some tweaking–so we’ll say that brings us to October 10th. It’s my sincere hope that I can get a copyeditor to go through the whole thing in three weeks, which beings us back to September 20th.

So, then. Three weeks to finish the writing. No pressure, eh?

There’s some wiggle room in there, but not much. I can’t really afford so much as a day of slacking off, and I’m probably going to have to make some compromises on the re-write. No vast, sprawling edits, just aligning and tightening what’s already there. A week or two for line-editing, which I’ve been doing as I’m going along (and some of which will happen in that final month, anyway). You might say, then, that I have two weeks to get the plot/character portion of the novel finished.

Anyone up for a NaNoWriMo-style write-a-thon? I’ll probably need to pull 2500-3000 words a day to get things finished on time. I’ll need to write mornings and evenings. It’s strange how release can be so far off, and yet there’s so little time to get everything done.

Unfortunately, it’s even worse than it sounds. I’m moving this weekend, so until Sunday I’ve got serious competition for my attention. Then, the weekend after, I’ll be out of town at the in-laws. Gonna be hard to write there. Then there’s my weekly roleplaying game, which I’ll be preparing for. This is all stuff I really want to do, but so’s finishing FfE.

Fortunately, I think I have what it takes. If there was ever a time for me to earn my pro stripes, this is it. Damn the torpedoes, gentlemen.